Pennine Lines w/c 4 March 2024
One of the things that’s always drawn me to photography, specifically British landscape photography, is the alchemy of creating something out of apparently nothing. Or to put it another way, how it’s possible to craft a composition which allows you to find some sort of beauty out of a scene or location that you might otherwise walk right past without giving it another thought. Any idiot can take a passable photo of an epic location in amazing light, but the greater challenge is in creating order within the frame from the chaos of the world around us, to allow it to be understood and appreciated.
Pennine Lines w/c 28 August 2023
But moving beyond the nuts and bolts of relaying information to you, guidebooks at their best are passports not only to X, Y or Z problems on the ground; long before you even set foot at the crag they are fuel for the fires of the imagination to burn. Although the pages of any guide are crammed full of words and photos they act as a sort of blank canvas to sketch out any one of thousands of possibilities played out in your mind’s eye. We can all be heroes when reading a guidebook. Every day is perfect weather, every hold feels good, every move made with confidence. Anything is possible.
Pennine Lines w/c 26 June 2023
This was one I actually had lined up to feature in Grit Blocs once I’d got some shots of Ned attempting this at the end of a long day mopping up some other photos for the book. It would have at the very least got a mention in the Swivel Finger section, or there was a chance it could have bumped that problem out entirely, as it looked superb, and as a long-standing project carried a bit of gravitas. In the end I visited once more with Ned but again we left empty handed, and in fact it took Ned until this April to seal the deal.